The Hawkeye test

Jim Hines gets an article on BBC News. Hines is a 38-year-old male science fiction author with a weird hobby: he emulates the poses women are put into on science fiction and comic book covers, and takes pictures of himself. They look ridiculous. A lot of them also look extraordinarily painful.

It also mentions an interesting test:

The Hawkeye Initiative swaps male and female characters to challenge the portrayal of women in comics.

Started in December 2012, the project already has nearly 1,000 submissions from fans.

Most "redraws" cast the Avengers character Hawkeye in the same position as the female character in the original work.

Then, the Hawkeye Test is administered.

According to the site, if Hawkeye can replace the female character without "looking silly or stupid, then it’s acceptable and probably non-sexist. If [he] can’t, then just forget about it."

The conventions of SF and comic book art have a lot to answer for: even I, the homely old geezer with a ‘testosterone-damaged’ brain, find the hyper-sexualized and exaggerated contortions those imaginary women are put into horribly repellent. So why do artists keep painting this same crap over and over again?

Gallo thinks part of the problem is that male artists greatly outnumber female artists in the industry.

“You go to art school, and it’s 50-50,” Gallo said. “But professionally, it’s overwhelmingly male.

“This is an unfortunate fact of the industry. These artists grew up with comics and gaming, so it’s easy to perpetuate these things without thinking them through.”

Oh. Another glass ceiling effect. Women are just as interested in creating art as men, but somehow, they find themselves less employable. We see that in science, too. <sarcasm>But no, of course there is no discrimination or sexism</sarcasm>.

Oh, and before someone jumps in to evoke the magic invisible hand of the market…

Marketing strategies may also be responsible for sexist covers. But the mantra that sex sells may not be accurate.

According to 2012 data from publishing industry analysts Codex Group, less overtly explicit covers in fact have a wider appeal among general readers.

Blocked!

The good people at CFI have been getting spammed by the usual cranky suspects on twitter, so they have officially announced their policy for blocking people on twitter. It’s a good set of general rules, and is actually simple common sense: there are people out there who don’t recognize reasonable limits and use twitter for non-stop harassment. I personally am pretty liberal about blocking — with something like a hundred thousand followers, it’s fairly easy to get swamped with noise, and one person trying to dominate a conversation can really derail everything. As Fidalgo points out, “‘block and ignore’ is Twitter’s own advice about handling this kind of thing.”

There are six comments on the announcement so far. Would you believe every one of them is from a slymepitter whining bitterly about the policy? Yes, of course you would. When all they’ve got is “raw hectoring” and abuse to offer, of course they’re going to complain when someone declares that they won’t be listening to raw hectoring and abuse.

The con game

Aral Balkan writes about false dichotomies and diversity at conferences — at tech conferences. These issues come up in every field, and we atheists aren’t alone.

A person who calls for greater diversity is not necessarily advocating the implementation of a quota system — that’s a straw man fallacy. Similarly, having a diverse roster of speakers at a conference does not imply that those speakers were not chosen on merit. Diversity and a merit‐based selection process are not mutually exclusive. To state the contrary is a false dichotomy. And before assuming that a conference probably couldn’t find enough women because not enough women applied (blaming the victim), first find out whether or not the selection process actually included an open call for talks.

He covers the concerns well, but I want to add another point. Every time we discuss this stuff, there will be a number of people with sour grapes syndrome: they will say that conferences are too expensive (which is true), too difficult to get to (also true), and impossible to schedule for busy people with families (agreed). And then they will say they’re elitist and that they don’t need to go hear a bunch of jerks pontificate from a stage anyway, and that’s where they’re going wrong.

Every form of endeavor or interest that I’ve been associated with has conventions of some sort or another. When I was a software designer, we had cons. We even had in-house cons: the company I was affiliated with as an independent contractor, Axon Instruments, would bring us all in to learn about up-and-coming hardware and new programming techniques. I read science fiction; hoo boy, do they have cons everywhere. SF cons are all about bringing fans together to talk and brainstorm and have fun. And then of course, there’s science: every field has regular conventions on various scales, from local consortia to regional meetings to national events to international mega-conferences.

And here’s why equality is important: those meetings are essential stepping stones in career advancement. In my very first year as a grad student, I was trained and groomed to present my work at local meetings. Heck, when I was an undergraduate and had made it clear that I planned to pursue a research career, my professors took me to regional meetings. We all knew that this was how preliminary work was disseminated, that this was how you made connections with peers and leaders in the field, that this was how you linked your face and name in the community as a whole with a body of work.

It’s also where graduate students go to find post-doctoral positions, where post-docs go to find tenure-track jobs, where university departments send representatives to do preliminary interviews.

And of course the other important part of the meeting circuit is that that is where you get inspired and get new ideas. I have never gone to a science meeting but that I’ve come home afterwards fired up and excited about some line of research that I hadn’t known about before. It’s where I talk to new people and get new perspectives.

So don’t belittle cons if you can’t go. These events matter. It’s where community is built, where volunteers grow to play a bigger role in the progression of our goals, where everyone gets enthusiastic about some shiny new aspect of the subject.

And that’s absolutely why we have to do a better job of opening doors for everyone at these events. It’s the faces in the audience at the convention that will someday be leading the movement. It’s those faces that will go home afterwards and share the stories and get more people interested. And if we don’t make opportunities for participation by everyone, we will be limiting our growth.

So please, don’t complain. Your concerns are legitimate: a con may be too expensive, too far away, too inconvenient for you. You should instead try to think of ways to get one near you that you can afford and attend…and there are more and more of these things emerging all over the place.

What we should focus on is making them more accessible, more common, and more openly participatory.

Not cool. Not cool at all.

There’s a common tactic that gets used against me a lot: random harassers sign me up for magazines. I’ve been signed up for gay magazines, motorcycle magazines, chicken farmer magazines…all kinds of stuff with the intent of causing me trouble.

The latest slimy move — and it coincides with Reap Paden’s angry spammy comment sprees, just sayin’ — is to sign me up for test drives at local car dealerships. And then I get a cheerful call from some sales person who, in good faith, thinks I’m in the market for a Chevy Tahoe or a Honda Civic or something, and we then have a friendly conversation in which I say they’ve been hoaxed, I’m sorry but I’m not buying a car right now, but I will keep them in mind for the future, and they apologize, and I say, “oh, no, I apologize for the trouble”, and we have a little friendly back and forth, and then we’re done.

It’s absolutely no trouble for me — I have a brief, pleasant, and entirely amicable conversation. But you know what? This game you’re playing is wasting innocent people’s time and money. In your pathetic attempt to lash out at me, you are failing completely…but you are succeeding in using otherwise uninvolved bystanders as your pawns, and costing them some effort. Effort you won’t make yourself because you’re a coward and would rather hide behind some hardworking guy at the local dealership or some clerk at a publishing house.

That makes you an asshole. Knock it off. You want to harass me? Do it to my face, don’t hide, and don’t involve others to do your dirty work for you.

Fucking scumbag cowards. All you’ve succeeded in doing is to continually increase my contempt for you. Good job.

Well, now you know what to blame

Michael Savage, the rabid far-right talk radio loon, has gone on a tear against vaccination. He’s ranting about how those damned Democratic politicians aren’t getting any flu shots (really? I kind of doubt that).

But then he also goes on to make claims of dire outcomes.

But when you’re older, he argued, “and you get ALS or Alzheimer’s disease or MS, or you watch your kid develop seizures, or your kid becomes autistic, God forbid, what are you going to say?”

You know, I’m getting older, and I’ve been getting my flu shot every year for years…but I just realized that’s not going to convince any of those kooks, is it?

Catholic hospitals have ethics commissions?

But aren’t ethics in conflict with Catholic policy?

The latest case of Catholic callousness comes out of Germany, where a young woman was brought into an emergency center with signs of sexual assault; she had no memory of what had occurred and may have been doped with a date rape drug. She was treated by a Dr Maiworm, who then called the local Catholic hospital to arrange a gynecological examination, which ought to be routine. But that’s where it gets strange.

According to the paper, the doctor told Maiworm that the hospital’s ethics commission, after consulting with Cardinal Joachim Meisner, had decided not to conduct exams after sexual attacks, so as not to be in the position of having to advise on possible unwanted pregnancies resulting from the attacks.

Maiworm told the paper that the doctor did not change her mind, despite having been told that she had already written the woman a prescription for the morning-after pill. A colleague of Maiworm’s was given a similar explanation at another Catholic hospital in Cologne, according to the paper. Both hospitals are run by the Foundation of the Cellites of St. Mary.

The church is now claiming that it was all a “misunderstanding”, and that they don’t have a policy denying treatment to rape victims. But that still doesn’t explain why this woman was turned away and not given a routine examination.

I think the simplest solution for the future is to simply deny Catholic dogmatists any influence on medical decisions at all. Haven’t recent events been sufficient to conclude that they’re morally compromised?